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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Pennsylvania's State Tree Under Attack

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Monday, May 19, 2014   

WARREN, Pa. - What started as a chance sighting during a brush with nature last summer has led to a deeper understanding that Pennsylvania's state tree is at major risk. The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid is a tiny bug that clamps onto hemlock trees and can be moved from place to place by birds, human activity, and even the wind. Kirk Johnson, executive director, Friends of Allegheny Wilderness, made the discovery in Warren County. Testing has since confirmed that what he saw was, in fact, evidence of these destructive creatures.

Johnson says it was a development he feared for several years.

"The devastation is usually complete on most stands of hemlock trees. Once the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid is present in any given stand, you're looking at mortality of hemlock trees upwards of 90 percent or more," Johnson warns.

There is good and bad news associated with a solution to the infestation, he adds.

"You can take preventative action by treating individual, old-growth hemlock trees with insecticide," he explains. "It will kill the insects and will protect the tree for several years at a time."

The bad news is that there is no landscape-scale treatment for the infestation, he says, so the process is time-consuming and costly. That leaves the Forest Service with a need to evaluate the extent of specific infestations and how best to handle them.

Johnson says the insects do their damage by feeding at the base of the needles, which is, in essence, where the tree stores its food reserves. Most recently, the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid was found in Allegheny State Park in New York, offering further evidence of its migration.






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